On Tue, 29 Nov 2016 16:12:52 +0000 Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.med...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Patrick Bartek <nemomm...@gmail.com> writes: > > > On Tue, 29 Nov 2016 09:11:37 +0000 Rodolfo Medina > > <rodolfo.med...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > >> Brian <a...@cityscape.co.uk> writes: > >> > >> > On Mon 28 Nov 2016 at 21:44:00 +0000, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > >> > > >> >> When I freshly installed Debian on my present system, I chose > >> >> Gnome as my Desktop manager, then I switched to Openbox. To > >> >> free space, now I want to remove all those Gnome packages that I > >> >> haven't used any more but am not sure what of them I may delete > >> >> without perturbing the system. How can I know? More > >> >> in general, is there a way to know what packages one is not > >> >> using and so can be > >> >> removed? > >> > > >> > apt-get purge gnome gnome-shell > >> > apt-get autoremove > >> > > >> > And go from there with 'dpkg -l'. > >> > >> > >> Thanks. But, my question is: how can I be sure and safe that doing > >> so will not perturbing my system? > > > > A few years ago, I attempted to entirely remove GNOME from my > > system. I had switched to the window manager Openbox and no longer > > needed GNOME and all its parts taking up valuble hard drive space. > > It proved impossible (or impractical) to do. GNOME lists OS parts > > among others, lots of others, as dependencies. Most of its > > utilities do the same. GNOME is quite invasive. So, a general > > "remove" or "purge" gnome, etc. would end up removing most of the > > OS rendering it useless. Even trying to uninstall its utilities and > > apps would result in similar situation, a broken system > > > > To make a long story short, I eventually ended up reinstalling the > > OS without any desktop environment, terminal only, then adding X, > > the window manager, etc. It was the only easy way I found to be > > totally GNOMEless. > > > I wonder if it's possible to provide Debian a set A of packages and > say: `please install these and only these and remove all the other > packages present on the disk except the ones from which some of A > depends.' This would be equivalent of reinstalling everything as > reported by Patrick. Do you think it would be possible? > Possible, but probably not off the shelf, or someone would have suggested it by now. As I said to begin my first reply, the only way to do a proper job is to start again from scratch, with a minimal text system, no DE, then add the GUI software of your choice, and your applications. And you probably want sudo, which as far as I know, is still not installed by default. -- Joe
